Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Politico: "The Flip-Flopping Architect of Obamacare": "Last week, the D.C. Circuit ruled that the Obama administration has been implementing Obamacare illegally. Days later, a video featuring the law’s chief architect confirmed the court’s ruling and raised questions about whether administration officials knew they were breaking the law all along."

Saturday, July 26, 2014

In other words, Congress did mean to use the subsidies to overcome state resistance and pressure them to set up their own exchanges. That is precisely what the plaintiffs in Halbig asserted. Of course, Obamacare's supporters didn't anticipate that the backlash against the law would be so intense that 34 states would actually decline the subsidies, almost as an act of civil disobedience.
On Friday morning, an embarrassed Gruber insisted to The New Republic's Jonathan Cohn, "I honestly don't remember why I said that… I was speaking off-the-cuff. It was just a mistake."

IIRC from the Halbig arguments, the defendants were unable to produce a single contemporaneous piece of evidence from the original drafting of Obamacare that, sure, subsidies would be available on the Federal exchange. To the contrary, as Jonathan Gruber explained at the time, they were meant to be a cudgel to force states into setting up their own exchanges. Now the Administration wants to pretend differently.

Friday, July 25, 2014

Day 2 with no DSL. Verizon will be here tomorrow, and I quote, "before 8 pm".

Update - Hooray for Verizon! Back up at 9:30am. Something fried my modem and a factory reset restored it. I had hooked up an old router and it didn't connect to the internet either, either wirelessly or via ethernet, so I assumed it was a DSL problem.

Today the court ruled that Obamacare subsidies paid through the Federal Obamacare exchange were illegal because the wording of the law unambiguously states that subsidies are only available through state-run exchanges. Hot Air picks it up:

Plain and simple, if Congress wants to rewrite the law to extend subsidies to federal enrollees, they’re welcome to do it. That’s what legislatures are for. But the law, as written, says what it says, and that’s not the court’s problem.

Monday, July 21, 2014

I tend to tune out the NY Times' liberal polemicist since even his own ombudsman described him as somebody with "disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults."

As Patterico ably demonstrates, the slicing blades were at full power in Krugman's latest take on the nation's long-term debt. By using the stimulus-heavy year of 2009 as the baseline for spending and deficits, Krugman now claims that "all is well" since we're now running slightly lower deficits. Also, he compares the total debt-to-GDP to post World War II levels as if this is contextual to modern times. Finally, Krugman ignores that revenues-to-GDP almost never rise above 20%, no matter what taxation rate is applied, so debt will rise inexorably when spending is above that level.

If current laws remained generally unchanged in the future, federal debt held by the public would decline slightly relative to GDP over the next few years, CBO projects. After that, however, growing budget deficits would push debt back to and above its current high level. Twenty-five years from now, in 2039, federal debt held by the public would exceed 100 percent of GDP, CBO projects. Moreover, debt would be on an upward path relative to the size of the economy, a trend that could not be sustained indefinitely.

Once again, as Patterico notes, liberals like Krugman wailed like banshees at the insignificant budget cuts of the sequester. There is zero chance they'll accept the $230+ billion in cuts or tax hikes required to close this gaping hole.

Saturday, July 19, 2014

I took the family to Northampton tonight, the hippie capital of Western Massachusetts, and there was some First World begging going on in front of Faces. Two zaftig girls were sitting on the sidewalk, reading paperbacks and smoking. Near their iced coffees was a sign reading "Please help - any amount accepted."

It breaks my cold, cold heart to see people settle for an iced latte instead of a caffe machiatto.

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Warning: rant ensuing. So I set up a tuition payment plan through Sallie Mae but, after I was done, the FAQ indicated it would not accept payment from a College 529 Account - the VERY THING designed to pay for college expenses! What?!? I don't know what's going on here...

Washington’s failure to contain entitlement spending is biting into the nation’s long-term fiscal outlook, the Congressional Budget Office warned in a Tuesday report that found the nation’s debt would jump to 106 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2039.
The CBO said the rising costs of entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security as the U.S. population continues to age are the drivers of U.S. debt.

Monday, July 14, 2014

It's been quite a while since I did an entitlement-related post and today Robert Samuelson provides some content in "The real Medicaid problem." Half the states in America have resisted the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare. Given the parallel to Social Security and Medicare, that's probably wise:

One is the assumption that the 90 percent reimbursement rate remains permanently. Why should it? To curb budget deficits, Congress might cut it. “The ACA says what it says. Future Congresses can repeal or modify it,” says Matt Salo of the National Association of Medicaid Directors. Could the favorable reimbursement be bait-and-switch? States’ actual costs could be higher than assumed. Why make a bad problem worse?Even if this doesn’t happen, demographic trends — also ignored by the White House report — are devastating for states. Medicaid’s cost structure is peculiar. Children and adults under 65 represent three-quarters of beneficiaries but only one-third of costs. The quarter who are aged and disabled represent two-thirds of costs. They are especially sickly and poor. More than 60 percent of nursing home residents have Medicaid.

Over the past quarter-century, the percent of states' budgets going to Medicaid has risen from 9% to 19%. When these expenses put pressure on state budgets, either taxes will need to go up or other spending will be curtailed. Hello Detroit:

What this means is that, as the population ages, states’ Medicaid spending will rise inexorably. The competition between nursing homes and home health care — on the one hand — and classroom teachers, higher education, police and other governmental services — on the other — will intensify. Medicaid becomes a vise squeezing other public services or requiring continuous tax increases. More spending goes toward meeting past obligations and not present and future needs. Underfunded state and local pensions compound the effect.

Opposition to the Medicaid expansion is always portrayed as a heartless choice by the states but I fail to see how setting a state on a glide path to slashed budgets and/or bankruptcy is particularly compassionate.

Thursday, July 10, 2014

I've been just crazy busy for this one-man blog between work and the considerable complexity of getting a kid prepped for college in a month. So here's a funny story I heard on NPR today: the people of Brazil have an unthinkable choice. Who do they root for in the World Cup final?

On the one hand is Argentina, Brazil's bitter rival in futbol but also its South American neighbor.

On the other hand is Germany, who delivered one of the most humiliating World Cup smackdowns to Brazil in the semi-finals.

It wasn't even close in an informal poll of Brazilians: a win for Argentina would be intolerable.

Tuesday, July 08, 2014

As I've written many times before, the political pressures of entitlement spending always lean towards reducing revenue-raising steps (taxes) and increasing benefits. It is inevitable. Weekly Standard: "An unfolding fiscal disaster - The calamitous finances of Obamacare."

No sooner was the ink dry on the ACA than the law’s various “pay-fors” began to be tossed overboard, one after the other.....Roughly $100 billion of financing in that first decade was also to come from penalties on individuals (for failing to carry health insurance) and employers (for failing to offer it). But the Obama administration has repeatedly postponed enforcement. Unsurprisingly, there is now a campaign to abandon the individual mandate penalty altogether, despite advocates having previously touted it as essential to the workings of the ACA. The administration has also been dropping cuts to Medicare Advantage required under the ACA, with the costs of these decisions still unknown.

It was always laughable to think that Obamacare would be deficit-neutral and the CBO, sensing the slight of hand in play, now says it's unable to make realistic cost projections. This will end like every other entitlement, adding trillions to the national debt.

Federalist: "The mean girls of global warming." "It should go without saying that this is what you do when you are losing the debate on the merits. The efforts of the warmthers these days have a lot to do with peer pressure, conformity enforced by mockery, and manipulation of the media. But this doesn’t have a lot to do with science."

Officials at those five schools refused to say what they paid Clinton. But if she earned her standard fee of $200,000 or more, that would mean she took in at least $1.8 million in speaking income from universities over the past nine months.

Nice work if you can get it and I don't begrudge Hillary from trying to make what she can, when she can. Hell, I'd never shut up at those rates. What I'd like to know is where is Elizabeth Warren, who never gives her victimology a rest? Why isn't she out there advocating for those students who are seeing their tuition skyrocket to support Hillary's speaking fees and lavish salaries for professors?